Bees!

     The Bees have arrived.

     Look at those happy guys. The man on the right is the Author's father. His name is John and he is in a lot of the pictures on this site. (Look for the hat.) The man on the left is Barry Wolf and he's a bit like Santa Claus. He comes from way up north and delivers gifts. Oh, and he's quite jolly too. Unlike Santa Clause, though, he's from Saskatchewan and it's not so much gifts that he delivers as cargo. He's still very jolly, though. Also, instead of a sleigh he uses a great big truck driven by a nice guy named Brendan.

     This monstrous truck is full of bees. Probably not the kind of bee you're envisioning right now, though. These are Leafcutter Bees and they come in board form. That white building behind the truck is where the boards are going to be moved to.

     This is the inside of the white building. It's actually the refrigerated box from a truck trailer. Inside you can see many bee-boards. We call them bee-boards because they used to be wooden boards. We still use many wooden boards, but these are made of polystyrene. They're about four feet long, one foot wide, and three inches thick. They are also full of holes.

     The holes are about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, or roughly leafcutter bee-sized. Not surprisingly, a leafcutter bee cuts leaves. They cut out little circles and use them to make little capsules or cells in any hole they find that is small enough. They'll even check your ears for vacancy, though I've never heard of them moving in. Most of the cells will have eggs laid in them but a few will be filled with what is called bee-bread. Bee-bread is a mix of honey and pollen (and some other ingredients, I'm sure) that will be food for the young bees after they mature.
     The boards are put into a refrigerated trailer so that the bees stay asleep. (They're not really asleep, but for the purposes of this post "asleep" will do.) The important thing is, so long as they think it's still winter, they'll stay put.
     Leafcutter bees are very important for the pollination of alfalfa, but all that's a long ways off (at least for them.) So for now, they sleep and dream of bright days and green leaves. (At least I hope they do.)